D’var Torah for Erev Yom Kippur 5768

9 Tishri 5768
September 21, 2007

An Unexpected Role Model

by Rabbi Maurice Harris

Good Yontiff. Before I begin, I want to say thank you to my spouse, Melissa Crabbe, for having many conversations with me that helped inspire these remarks. Her influence on what I’m going to share tonight is significant, and I’m grateful for it.

There’s a member of the Jewish community who I’d like to talk about this evening – someone who has lived an extraordinary life. I haven’t told him beforehand that he would be the focus of my talk, so I don’t know how he might react. He’s someone who has lived a life that is so compelling, so filled with controversy and contradiction, that on this sacred day when we make time to reflect on the meaning of our lives, I was drawn to talk about what his life might mean to all of us.

His is not the classic “nice Jewish boy makes good” story. Let me start at the beginning. He was born Jewish, but persecution and chaotic political times left him orphaned and adopted by a non-Jewish family. They were prominent, well-to-do, people with clout, and social status. This part of his bio reminds me a little of the cantor of the synagogue of my childhood – also born Jewish but placed for safe keeping as an infant with a Christian family in France in order to escape the Holocaust. For his own safety my cantor wasn’t told of his Jewish identity until he’d already grown up singing in church choirs, but once he learned about this part of his background he passionately embraced Judaism and channeled his musical gifts into the art of hazzanut, cantorial music.

Unlike my cantor, the man I’m speaking about tonight was told about his Jewish background as a young child, and he struggled with complex identity issues throughout his youth. He was, of course, accustomed to the family he’d grown up with, but he was also alienated from them and their elite friends, particularly their ostentatious wealth and insensitivity to social injustice.

He became pretty mixed up as a young man and had problems with his temper, at times becoming violent. Eventually he got into serious trouble with the law. He killed a man – he says it was an accident, a witness said it wasn’t. He fled the jurisdiction and then the country, and he was convicted in court in abstentia. Now an ex-con and a fugitive, his life was a shambles. His adoptive family became confused and devastated. For his own protection, he laid low in the rural margins of his new country.

I think one of the reasons I’m so interested in this person’s life is that his story completely defies the stereotypes we tend to associate with Jewish men, and yet despite that he would go on to contribute so much to Jewish life. Jewish men, they say, are smart, sensitive, educated, gentle, stable, and good providers. As my wife, Melissa’s, Auntie Kim, who is Chinese, said to her approvingly after meeting me and sizing me up – “Good match! Steady boy, not playboy. Good match.” Auntie Kim would not have approved of the man I’m talking about tonight -- an orphaned ex-con & fugitive with no money, legal problems a mile long, and anger management issues.

There’s another important piece to his story – one that he didn’t like talking about. He had a disability that was embarrassing to him, and being mocked for it early in life may have accounted for his temper. It was a speech disorder that got worse the more anxious he became, a kind of stutter and getting stuck verbally under stress. It got in the way of a lot of things – it embarrassed his refined, high-bred parents. His disability also seemed unmanly in the macho culture he grew up in. And it made him stand out, which was something he never liked. This was a man who didn’t seek attention at all, and being noticed was especially difficult for him.

Anyway, after some years passed the legal case against him back home went cold. His adoptive parents grew old and never got over their loss, and he didn’t keep in touch with them. In his new country he found modest work as an undocumented immigrant and basically kept to himself. The Jewish demographers who publish anxious reports about intermarriage would not be thrilled that he intermarried, twice, actually, over the course of his life. Many rabbis might chafe over the fact that he never set foot once in a synagogue or belonged to a single Jewish organization – not event a Jewish Community Center. The Federation folks might gossip that he never wrote a single check to a Jewish charity.

With this kind of background, he went on to do a number of things that have had a profound influence on Jewish life and on radical politics, too, including the contemporary liberation theology movement and other causes ranging from anti-sweatshop campaigns to progressive anti-poverty movements. The turning point in his life came in his older age, when he decided to act definitively on his Jewish identity and get involved in the needs of the Jewish community. He was a man with rough edges who became an important Jewish leader late in life.

In fact, in his later years this man came to identify so strongly with the Jewish people that at times his own family took a back seat to his Jewish community service work. He became a prolific Jewish writer, a courageous activist, and an impressive community organizer. He was an insider–outsider of the Jewish people, and yet a remarkable leader. It may be that his multi-cultural experience of the world helped give him some useful perspectives on Jewish problems that made him more creative and effective as an advocate and agent of social change. In fact, the Jewish people have been permanently and profoundly influenced to the core by his life’s work.

I’m speaking, of course, about Moses.

Moses’ life is a classic story of an outsider who becomes a crucial leader and a catalyst for change. He began his life with only the sketchiest awareness of being a Jew, and yet later he became actively involved in the life of his people. At my very first Kol Nidre service here four years ago, I spoke about the importance of diversity within the Jewish community, and I talked about how so many of us today are insider-outsiders of the Jewish people. Many of us, like Moses, have important parts of our selves that have been nurtured outside the world of Judaism. Many of us have family who are not Jewish – like Moses with his Egyptian adoptive mother, and his Midianite wife and influential father-in-law. If you are someone who happens to engage Jewish life minimally, I invite you to think about the fact that that’s something Moses shared in common with you for a good part of his life.

In our sibling religion, Christianity, ministers often teach their congregants to try to emulate the life of their prophetic leader. It’s interesting that Judaism doesn’t really mirror that practice. Traditional Judaism has for centuries taught Jews to be faithful to God and perform the mitzvot that God revealed to Moses, but the message in the synagogues and Hebrew schools hasn’t been – “try to be more like Moses.” In fact, there’s a well-known midrash in which a great sage explains that when each Jew arrives at the heavenly court in the afterlife, God does not ask them, “In your life on earth, why were you not more like Moses,” but rather, God asks, “Why were you not more like yourself?”

What I’d like to suggest tonight is that in our era of culturally hybridized life – and we are all cultural hybrids – we are now living in a moment when many of us can start looking at Moses as a personal role model, but not in a way that traditional Judaism would have imagined a few centuries ago. Just as Moses spent much of his life outside the Jewish community, and just as Moses had many issues that put him outside the mainstream of Judaism (his criminal history, his disability, his intermarrying), so too many of us in this room have led somewhat wandering Jewish lives. What Moses’ life can model for today’s Jewish wanderers is the idea that every Jew who has lived at a distance from Jewish life for any part of their lives can choose to enter into the Jewish community and bring their wisdom, values, talents and ideals to bear upon Judaism. Judaism evolves and is influenced by people who give it their energy and creativity, and some of those people – like Moses – spend a part of their lives outside the Jewish world.

So if you’re a twice-a-year Jew, or if you’re carrying the baggage of a bad childhood synagogue or Hebrew school experience, or if you’re comfortable with one aspect of Judaism but stand at a great distance from other aspects, here’s my message. We need you. We need you in this Jewish community, and we want you to bring all of yourselves – your experiences in other spheres, your ideals, your values, your questions, your passions and hopes. The Judaism that’s going on in places like Temple Beth Israel and other liberal synagogues is a Judaism that welcomes you and offers you the opportunity to find meaning and create community. It needs active participants with new questions, new quarrels, new experiences and complex lives to reach its highest potential. Our tradition’s greatest prophet was an outsider before he became an insider. He set the precedent for today’s Jewish outliers to become participants in the ongoing evolution of our tradition. To all you Jews who have wandered or are wandering now, TBI is the kind of place that says, “you belong.”

I’d like to shift gears now and turn to another aspect of Moses’ life that has something to teach us. This is something I started thinking about during one of my mom’s visits to Eugene this past year. She heard me give a d’var Torah at a Friday night service in which I quoted Moses’ final attempt to persuade God to allow him to enter the Promised Land. As you may recall, while the Jews wandered in the wilderness for 40 years en route to the Promised Land, Moses committed a sin that resulted in God deciding that he would not be allowed to enter the Land of Israel along with the people. This was a devastating for Moses, and in the d’var Torah that I gave that night I quoted the following passage in which Moses described to the Jewish people how he tried to persuade God to permit him to at least set foot in the Promised Land and take a brief tour of its different regions. Moses said to the Israelites:

And I pleaded with the Eternal … saying,
“O Eternal God, you have begun to show your servant your greatness, and your mighty hand; for what deity is there in heaven or in earth, that can do according to your works, and according to your might? I beg you, let me cross over, and see the good land that is beyond the Jordan [River], that good mountain region, and the Lebanon territory.”

But the Eternal was angry with me on your account, and would not hear me; and the Eternal said to me, “Rav Lach! This is enough for you! Speak no more to Me of this matter.

Get up to the top of Mt. Pisgah, and look around to the north, south, east, and west, and view [the land] with your eyes; for you shall not go over [the Jordan River].

Then charge Joshua, and encourage him, and strengthen him; for he shall cross over at the head of this people, and he shall cause them to inherit the land which you shall only see.”
(Deut 3:23-28)

After services that night, my mom asked me why I thought God didn’t allow Moses to even set one foot in the Promised Land. She just couldn’t get her mind around the harshness of not allowing this great man his dying wish – this man, who – whatever his mistakes might have been – had struggled so intensely for over 40 years on behalf of God and the Jewish people. It was then I had an insight that others may have had before me, but it was new to me.

“You know, mom,” I said, “Maybe what the Torah’s describing is just one of those hard boundaries of life. Maybe the story of Moses’ life and death, with its surprising opportunities for greatness and its terrible disappointments, is meant to teach us about one of the ultimate truths about our lives. We get some opportunities to do meaningful and remarkable things in our lives – not necessarily the things we expect -- and then there are some things we want so very badly that we just never get to do. Maybe what we can learn from Moses’ life is that even someone who gets to do the most extraordinary things – great things that he never dreamed as a younger person he’d ever have anything to do with – even such a person experiences the hard edged boundaries of life and death like the rest of us.

This year in particular, Moses has caused me to think a lot about the unexpected opportunities for meaning and the terrible disappointments in my life. At every stage of my life before now I didn’t know that I would end up adopting two older children from the foster care system. And with my love for Hebrew names, I certainly didn’t think I would have a son named Hunter. Or a daughter named Clarice. Rebecca and David, Rachel and Nathan – that was what I had imagined. The universe had other ideas.

While my focus was on creating meaning in my life through my work and the pursuit of my dreams, the biggest opportunity of my entire life for living out higher meaning came to me in the form of two children who were born here while I was studying for the rabbinate in Philadelphia, utterly unaware of what was unfolding. The moment Hunter and Clarice became a part of our lives was the moment God called Melissa and me away, by name, from our other preoccupations, just like God called Moses away from tending the sheep near Mt. Sinai. Clarice and Hunter were presented to us as a remarkable opportunity to change the whole course of our lives, and we chose to say, “Hineini” – here I am – and step into the unknown.

Like so many of you, and like Moses, the great opportunities for higher meaning in our lives came from unexpected places and have taken us into new territory. In giving ourselves over to the journey, we have been delighting in the awesomeness of the adventure. We’re thankful to God for it. And, like Moses and the rest of you, we’ve experienced the harsh, hard edges of life. We wanted to have biological children. In the worst way. God said no, you can’t go into that land. Hundreds of times I said the same prayer so many of our biblical ancestors offered with success: “Please, God, let us conceive.” After the clock ticked away our hope, God’s silence felt to me like God’s final refusal to Moses’ plea to enter the Promised Land: Rav Lach! This is enough for you! Speak no more to Me of this matter.

A hard edged boundary. A disappointment with so many layered dimensions of loss. I lost my father when I was 18. I don’t really look much like him. He had red hair. One of the only genetic legacies he left me that I can see with my own eyes is a sprinkling of red whiskers in my beard. I consoled myself for years with the thought that maybe one of my children would have red hair. Rav lach. You will not enter that land. Others will cross that river and revel in it. Not you. Speak to Me no more of this matter.

Life gives each of us harsh boundaries and opportunities for meaning. Sometimes the opportunities for meaning are the ones we work for and plan for. Sometimes they come from out of the blue and give us the option of making an unexpected journey out of our lives.

One of the things Judaism does best is give a powerful ritual and communal framework for mourning the painful, harsh edges of our lives, and for celebrating the parts of our lives that flower with meaning and give us the deepest happiness. And that brings me back to our congregation. Temple Beth Israel – with its accepting and loving approach to Jewish life – is the kind of place where we have the opportunity to come together and offer each other support around life’s harsh edges. It’s also a place where we have a chance to celebrate the experiences of higher meaning, and add to their richness through the beauty of Judaism.

So I want to close tonight by asking you to do something. I invite you to think about Moses, and think about what kind of congregation would open its doors to someone who has lived a complex life with influences from well outside Judaism, someone who has lots to offer to Judaism but might not fit the most mainstream Jewish mold. I invite you to think about the kind of congregation that would rally round such a person in their moment of deepest loss and that would celebrate their greatest accomplishments. Is that the kind of community you value?

Then I want to ask you to think about the world we’re living in right now, in 2007. A world in which extremists of every religion are pushing a kind of religion that few, if any, of us in this room would see as anything other than rigid and sometimes violent. One of the bumper stickers I see from time to time says, “God please save me from your followers.”

It’s funny, but how sad that it’s also serious.

So here we are, at Temple Beth Israel, in little Eugene, waving our little flag of progressive, humanistic religion – religion that helps make people more inclusive and tolerant, not less; religion that helps make our kids respect and value other religions, not demonize them; religion that invites the open mind to question and that sees questioning as very Jewish and spiritually healthy, not dangerous. If you believe that it’s important for congregations like ours to flourish and to create a vibrant, healthy religious counterweight to the religious right in the public square, then I ask you to do something about it. Join this synagogue if you haven’t yet, and help us build our future.

Uh oh – here comes the pitch. Well, yes, and I’m not embarrassed to make one tonight, on this night when we are focusing on what’s really important. A pitch is just me asking you to consider doing something. Well, I’m asking. I’m asking because I think it matters, and I know many of you think so too.

Join me in putting a real foundation under an institution that will promote a Judaism of progressive values. Join me in making sure that Eugene has, for decades to come, a Jewish center for religious and cultural life that exemplifies the best of what religion can be when it comes from a loving and nurturing place, not a place of dogmatism and spiritual superiority. Join me in giving ourselves and the next generation an anchor that allows Jews with open hearts and open minds to feel like they can be at home in Eugene. We need people and we need money, not just so we can own the beautiful building at 29th and University outright, but so we can endow a future of Jewish programming that we want to include Jewish cultural arts, meaningful Jewish adult education, and the capacity to be there for more of our elderly. If you believe in what we’re about, then join us and make it happen. If someone from our capital campaign leaves you a voicemail, please get back to them and build this dream. If tentative feelings have kept you from joining, call us and claim your citizenship in this community. If you value it, help write TBI into the book of life. As our president said at Rosh Hashanah, there is no TBI out there. There’s just us. We’ve pretty much all been insider-outsiders, just like lots of Jews these days, just like Moses.

May each of us find the opportunities for higher meaning in our lives and embrace them when we can. May each of us find comfort and acceptance in the face of life’s harsh boundaries. And may each of us be sealed for a year of goodness and growth.

G’mar chatimah tovah.